Prompt # 25 – What Do You Love?

Prompt # 25 – What Do You Love?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A great title, by a great “local” writer, Raymond Carver, who, although he was American, lived and died a few mile from here in Port Angeles, Washington State, on the northern tip of the Olympic Peninsula. He grew up in Yakima, in southwestern Washington, inside the curve of the Columbia River. Usually I'm a passionate, even radical, fan of Canadian literature because I love both this place, Canada, and literature itself, especially the way it holds up mirrors and forces us to see, to look at and to see ourselves. It celebrates us. However, I make three exceptions for American writers who have lived near here, in Washington State, on the US west coast, in what they call the Pacific Northwest (because, of course, for us, it's really the Pacific Southwest.) The Americans? Gary Snyder who lived along the Skagit, which rises in Canada. Raymond Carver. Jack Kerouac of On the Road fame, who came from a New England family which had migrated from Quebec, and who through his friendship with Snyder, found summer work on a fire lookout in the Cascades, his eyes on Canadian mountains and Canadian sky. He wrote about it in Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums. (Desolation Peak is the name of a mountain almost on the border.) I should also add Annie Dillard who for some years lived on Lummi Island, near Bellingham, between here and Seattle, and wrote one of my favourite pieces. It's Chapter 7 in her The Writing Life, about flying and art, about a pilot friend at the Bellingham Air Show (but in my mind it is the famous Abbotsford Air Show) and about flying around Mount Baker, “the old man with white hair who sits there smoking,” the mountain we watch all the way out from Vancouver to Abbotsford and Chilliwack. 

Am I ducking the question? Love is not an easy topic, because instantly my brain says Who? Instead of What? And Who crosses privacy lines. Who wants to intrude upon other people's privacy? And I think there's something else. Scripts in my head. A former lover who pleaded: “Don't say that. Everyone who has ever said 'I love you' has left me. So don't say that.” And my late mother who had similar advice when referring to pets. “They just die. You can always get another cat or dog, but you know that like all the rest, they're going to die too.” Love and death. It's as if daring to love is daring death, giving the finger to death. Seizing and living in the moment, for this too shall end. Like the Lone Ranger and Tonto duking it out. Oh, yes, I should add another American writer. Sherman Alexie. From Spokane, Washington. When they made the movie of his Smoke Signals, two great Canadian First Nations actors played the leads—Adam Beach and Evan Adams.

So. What do I love? Canada, and especially the places where I've lived and visited. Manitoba. BC. Montreal. Toronto. Kingston. Whitehorse. Literature. Especially Canadian Literature (CanLit.) See my CanLit Reading List. http://www.CanLitPlace.blogspot.ca/ Literature in general, especially Thomas Hardy. I love Beauty, especially Nature, natural beauty, flowers, landscape, cats and dogs (remembering my beloveds Julie and Cami .) I love houses, history, heritage. Sunshine. Lightning. Snow on a sunny day. Fog on a misty day. I love poetry and narrative. Stories, especially British television dramas—Coronation Street, Heartbeat, Foyles War, Morse, Lewis, Midsomer Murders, Downton Abbey. Some American drama—The Good Wife, Grey's Anatomy, Bones. Canadian dramas—Republic of Doyle, Arctic Air, old DaVinci's Inquest. I also love shows about houses, and about treasures hidden in houses--Antiques Roadshow, Canadian Pickers, UK Pawn Stars.

I know. I know. I watch way too much television. I have the TV or CBC radio on sixteen hours a day. I live alone, work at home, and prefer to shop and drive by myself. Introverted. Focused. Sometimes too anxious to be able to enjoy the luxury of other people's driving. Of course, I love my family members. My late parents. My late grandparents. My brothers who both have families and lives of their own thousands of kilometers from here. I am lucky to have friends and good neighbours. Good friends from high school and from work over forty years. Good friends here who walk with me, meet for coffee, pizza, play Scrabble, talk art and books and genealogy, and the disappointments of politics. Share holidays.

Sometimes it's easier to ask the question backwards. What do you not love? What do you hate? I hate cruelty, bullying, meanness, abuse, violence, injustice. I hate boxes into which parts of us are scrunched, forced to fit at the expense of our true shapes and sizes. Boxes labelled: Class. Gender. Sexuality. Income brackets. Nations. Races. Professions. Couples. Cliques. Location. Location. Locations. (I've always felt that I have to defend rural living.) And what is it that I do about this? I write. Dancing With Ghosts: A Cross-Cultural Education. http://www.dancingwithghostsaneducation.blogspot.ca/ In Your Dreams. A Modest Proposal. Anything You Say. The Truth About Reconciliation. Imagine—Canada 2017. The Annotated Morag. Here In Hope: A Natural History. And my Earthabridge blog which I seem to have abandoned while I tackle these prompt. http://www.earthabridge.blogspot.ca/

I'm going to finish by going back to Raymond Carver who died in 1988. “And did you get what / you wanted from this life, even so? / I did. / And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.”

Like I said. Lucky. (Delusional perhaps, but definitely lucky.)